Best Soundbars 2017

The premium Sonos Playbase features just about everything you could want in a soundbar, offering room-filling sound within a slick design that will look great in your entertainment center or directly under your TV. The Playbase is big on bass and offers rich vocals thanks to its 10 custom-made drivers, and it does a great job doubling as a Wi-Fi speaker for any of your favorite music apps. Best of all, it can be paired with any other Sonos speakers in your home for the ultimate multiroom experience, and supports voice commands via Amazon's Alexa.

The Vizio SB2920 is a tremendous value, offering room-filling sound, especially impressive bass and a plethora of ports for under $100. With two powerful speakers that can pump out up to 95 decibels of sound, the SB2920 is an excellent budget option whether you want to get lost in your favorite movies or simply want to crank out some tunes from your phone via Bluetooth.

No soundbar packs huge audio into a tiny package quite like the Polk MagniFi Mini does. This unassuming speaker will fit seamlessly into any setup, and delivers crisp dialogue and deep bass with the help of its included wireless subwoofer. Plus, with Google Cast support, the MagniFi Mini doubles as a great home music speaker.

Now that 4K TVs are more attainable, you're going to want a soundbar that's optimized for ultra-HD sets. Enter the JBL Cinema SB 450, which offers 4K passthrough to preserve the full audio quality of your favorite 4K content. The 450 also offers deep bass via its subwoofer and is painlessly easy to set up, making it a good alternative to going through the pain of finding a pricey home theater system for your 4K TV.

The Yamaha YAS-203 delivers big, immersive sound in a relatively affordable package, making it worthy of your living room, no matter what your needs are. Whether you're watching an explosive action movie or just kicking back with some music, the YAS-203 has enough deep bass and crisp highs to make all of your media shine. Yamaha's soundbar works well with just about any size television, and is easy to control with either the included remote or Yamaha's optional Home Theater Controller app.

If you want true 5.1 surround sound in an affordable, convenient package, the Vizio S4251 is worth a look. Packing a subwoofer with two satellite speakers, the S4251 delivers immersive audio for movies and TV, complete with a convenient remote for tweaking the sound to your liking. The S4251 offers plenty of inputs for connecting to your home entertainment setup, and also supports Bluetooth for seamlessly playing music from your phone.

The Sony HT-NT5 soundbar has so many features for audio junkies, it's almost overwhelming. This premium $800 device is one of the few soundbars that can play 24-bit digital audio files, which is ideal for folks obsessed with hearing every bit of sonic detail. It has a bevy of wired and wireless connection options, including 4K video pass-through and Google Cast support for your favorite music and video apps. It doesn't hurt that the HT-NT5 is slim enough to slide unassumingly under your TV.

Despite its compact size (just 20 inches), the Razer Leviathan packs a 30-watt wallop using its two drivers and two tweeters. This soundbar brings out the best in the latest titles, and its small wired subwoofer — a bargain at this price — beefs up dialogue and brings the boom during firefights. While it’s not well-suited for the living room, gamers looking to get the best audio while blasting away at noobs will like what the Leviathan has to offer.

The Streamz headphones, now in a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter, aim to be the only piece of equipment music lovers need. How exactly? By using voice commands to select songs, albums, stations and playlists from Spotify and Pandora. Also, you can use their SD memory reader to store up to 256GB of tunes on the Streamz, so you're ready for road trips where you might lose your signal. Supports hi-res audio (including FLAC) using its built-in 96-kHz/16-bit DAC.

The $299 YAS-207 soundbar and subwoofer ships in July, but it will become much more powerful in August. That's because a firmware update will make it the first Soundbar to feature the new Virtual:X technology from DTS, which uses a post-processing algorithm to simulate surround sound with only two pieces of hardware. Made for those unable to drill holes in its wall or without the budget for an 11-piece sound system.